P2P throttling leading to net neutrality showdown in Canada

Some small ISPs have been complaining to Canadian regulators for weeks about …

Wireless Nomad, the small Canadian ISP that we profiled last year, has now stepped into the network neutrality debate (and we would expect nothing less from an ISP that was co-founded by a former EFF activist). The company has filed papers with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission asking that Bell Canada, which has begun using deep packet inspection to throttle all peer-to-peer traffic between 4:30pm and 2am, be forced to stop its practice. According to the filing, Bell "cripples Internet access for those communications by reducing their speed by approximately 90 percent" and "unduly impairs legitimate communications such as encrypted sessions."

Bell has been using such traffic shaping techniques on its own network since last year, but in March 2008, it expanded its filtering to encompass resellers of its Internet service—even when those resellers explicitly offered neutral connections to subscribers.

The tactic has infuriated the community of small ISPs in Canada, most of which depend upon line-sharing provisions to stay in business. Bell's action has removed one of the key ways in which the ISPs can differentiate themselves from Bell's own service (price is the other big one). When news of the move leaked out, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers filed a complaint with the CRTC, Canada's telecoms regulator, asking that Bell be forced to remove the filters from its wholesale service.

The CRTC has agreed that "an expedited process is appropriate" for handling the request, and final comments on the matter are due in the next few days; a preliminary decision should be forthcoming soon. Between this decision and the pending FCC decision in the Comcast case, North America should get a good deal more clarity this year about what constitutes reasonable network management.

The "devastating effects" of P2P

Bell's entire project turns on the claim that its network is being devastated by P2P traffic. Drowning beneath a tsunami of data, the company argues that it has no choice but to restrict high-bandwidth protocols so that other users can browse the web and make VoIP calls without disruption. But is that true?

In a conversation with Network World Canada earlier this month, Bell's head of regulatory affairs said that his users were "hostages" to a small number of P2P bandwidth hogs. The numbers he provided in that interview came from a 2006 presentation by Sandvine, the same company that powers Comcast's much-derided "delaying" of P2P here in the US. Sandvine has a huge interest in pushing high P2P numbers, of course, and with Internet capacity growing rapidly, two-year old data is probably not the best place to start when it comes to policy-making.

Wireless Nomad, for its part, says that "our subscribers have been generally satisfied with the speed of their Internet connections" and that it sees "no Internet service 'rush hour' problem that needs to be fixed." In addition, the company notes that its users have seen speed reductions of 90 percent on P2P traffic, and it says that the throttling is also affecting certain encrypted services like SSH (which are apparently being incorrectly flagged as P2P). But with the throttling in place, there appear to be no speed increases on HTTP traffic, leading the company to wonder what the point of the filtering was in the first place.

Fears of a P2P crisis are overblown

As I pointed out in a lengthy recent piece on Internet traffic numbers, P2P traffic is in fact surging, but it is not growing faster than router manufacturers and other gear makers can handle (other countries like South Korea and Japan already handle far higher per capita traffic loads). The highest estimates that we have seen on P2P show it doubling every twelve months, but other data shows lower figures. In any event, it remains manageable, especially at the Internet's core, which has enormous excess capacity thanks to widespread fiber links. At the edges, where P2P can become an issue, it generally affects cable systems due to their specific architecture, not DSL providers (but even Comcast has announced a plan to shape traffic without targeting specific protocols, so other approaches are certainly possible here).

Over at GigaOM, Om Malik has just written up a recent conversation that he had with Arbor Networks' CTO, who says that only 20 percent of Internet traffic is from P2P apps. A full 70 percent of traffic during peak periods comes from HTTP, with a huge chunk of that coming from HTTP streaming sites like YouTube. No word on whether Bell Canada plans to start throttling YouTube as well.

Wireless Nomad suggests, as critics of Comcast in the US have done, that ISPs continue rolling out network upgrades to handle the problem, rather than resort to complex and expensive DPI systems that generate these sorts of controversies. Internet service is simply not a "build once, sell over and over" service, says the filing.